Confessions of a Bad Mother (19 page)

And this is strangely comforting.

The boys play their favourite game,
Crash Bang
, and no one is
wounded. I even manage to get my two out of there without meltdown. Then as
soon as we get back, Lawrence starts screeching and hitting me. At bedtime I
ask him to put on his pyjamas and he spits in my face. The books say
Don’t reward bad behaviour
with attention
, but what about
when the children reward each other? He’s winding Lydia up. And when
she
does something naughty, he gives her attention, loads of it. Well,
you know what? Fuck this: I’ve had it. In a calm moment, or at least a
brief gap between rows, I send him into the hall and shut the door. Almost
immediately he calls out that he is sorry, comes back, finishes his dinner and
sits on my lap for a bit of
I Spy
Diggers
.

So I’ve solved the Great Parenting Problem! All I have to do is
Never Engage in an Argument, Never Lose My Temper and Never Raise My Voice. And
you know what really pisses me off ? All the books say that: all of them.

‘
The Great Truth you were seeking was right under your
nose
,’ says Peter, in his Zen Master voice.

‘Shut up. Just shut up.’

Squirrels are vandalizing the bird-feeder. They come round in gangs and
one keeps watch while the others force the lid off.

‘Bugger off!’ I shout at them. ‘BUGGER
OFF!!!’

‘Bugger off!’ shout Lydia and Lawrence. ‘Bugger off
!’ They repeat it a few more times, then Lawrence says: ‘I think
that’s enough now.’

At breakfast he asks: ‘Is it night-time in Australia?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re so clever, Mummy!’

The tantrums have mysteriously stopped. He comes home every day that
week with a sticker for being Extra Good, and more or less at that exact
moment, the same mysterious force turns Lydia into The Child From Hell. Outside
the flower shop, while Lawrence is buying me a bunch of pink carnations –
Aaaah
– she stamps on a pot of hyacinths. I shout at her and,
crying with rage, she does one of her faints. When she comes round, she resumes
whining, and whines all the way home. (This makes Lawrence even sweeter.) After
forty minutes of it I throw her in her cot, which I figure is better than
hurling her out the window. Then I put the radio on and try to think about the
Public Sector Borrowing Requirement, or Monica Lewinsky, or the weird mark on
the carpet that looks like the prostate gland.
I cannot
stand this
any more.
I make a cup of tea and suddenly realize it’s gone quiet.
And there’s no sign of Lawrence. I rush upstairs, holding my breath. When
I peer round the door, he’s under the bed retrieving Lydia’s teddy
slippers. She is standing in her cot, smiling. He says: ‘I’m just
going to fetch these to Lydia and I’ll be right back.’

Over our debriefing that night I tell Peter: ‘The boy’s
three, and his parenting technique is better than mine.’

‘I’m not saying anything,’ he says slowly. ‘Not
a thing.’

And he has inherited his father’s gift for spin. When I shove him
in his room for hitting me, he sweeps everything off the chest of drawers onto
the floor.

‘That’s quite naughty, Mummy,’ he admits. ‘But
it’s quite good as well.’

‘Oh, yes? Why’s that?’

He gestures at the top of the chest. ‘Because now this is all
clean.’

I tell Katarina all our ups and downs. Without immediate relatives on
hand she is someone to boast to, and when it goes pear-shaped she usually has a
strategy. She has begun teaching them to count and is now teaching Lydia to
say, ‘
May I
?’ She gets the hang of it straight away.

‘
May
I spill my milk?’

‘
May
I jump off the table?’

‘
May
I smack you, Mummy?’ When she does do those
things, I tell her off and Lawrence says: ‘Good, Mummy!’

‘Lydia!’ I say. ‘Stop hitting me!’

‘Come here, Mummy,’ says Lawrence. ‘I’ll deal
with Lydia.’

‘Aah, will you?’

‘I’ll kick her head off.’

Later he asks: ‘Did you get angry with her?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Sometimes you get angry with children
when they’re naughty, but you love them just the same.’

‘No!’ he says vehemently. ‘I
never
do!’

When I find a hairband in Lydia’s pocket I ask, ‘Can I
borrow it?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘But we can fight over it.’

There is an upside, however, to her stubbornness. ‘
The
stubbornness that got us over the border and out of Lithua-
nia
,’ my father used to say, although he was born in Stamford
Hill. That weekend we go to the woods, and she falls on a nettle. After a brief
whimper, she wraps a dock leaf round her hand and carries on. The emigrating
DNA combines impressively with Peter’s robust, outdoors genes. His was
the Dad that went Down the Gambia with a Thermos, mine the one for whom
roughing it was a hard seat at the Edinburgh Fringe.

But can I cope? I’m glad I made notes during this period, because
before, when someone told me their child had screamed for over an hour I
didn’t believe them. But here it is:
Lydia screamed for seventy mins
this a.m. Finally
Peter put her in her cot and she stopped.
She’d been to sleep, been fed. What the fuck was the matter??? I feel
like the father of Woody Allen’s character in
Radio Days: ‘How
do
I know why there were Nazis? I don’t know how a can opener
works.’
I don’t understand
anything
.

‘It’s all too difficult,’ I tell Peter.

‘You need to get out more.’

‘You mean go away, because I’m such a bad mother.’

‘No! You need a treat. You wanted to go to Paris with Claire.
Go.’

‘I can’t leave the children. It wouldn’t be
right.’

‘What’s “right”? Denying yourself any pleasure
in life?’

‘I had a biscuit yesterday.’

‘Right, that’s it.’

I go and get out my passport, where I see a photo of a brazen, unfeeling
woman. But Peter has arranged to leave work early on the Friday to collect the
children, so I have to go. Besides, they are already drawing their impressions
of the train.

The Eurostar is redolent of possibilities. I am a film director going to
Rome to cast my new epic; I am a spy taking the night train to Belgrade to
steal a microfilm; I am an heiress travelling to a secret assignation with the
sexy lawyer who used to live in our road; I am – crying.

Claire gets on at Ashford. We have champagne and peanuts and I feel
suddenly better. And I discover how much you can pack into a weekend without
children in it. We buy lots of affordable, nice clothes, and have breakfast,
coffee, lunch, tea, drinks and dinner – all without having to leave
suddenly because of a squabble, or to rush home to change poohey clothes.
Finally, Claire takes a picture of me having breakfast in bed: ‘Just to
prove you’ve done it.’ It is my Eiffel Tower.

Summer is here, and we’re heading for the Empty Quarter. We
don’t have the confidence or the energy to go abroad. Anyhow, we know
that no package has been invented that takes care of a three and a two year
old, while letting the adults read a book. I look at a Mark Warner brochure and
reread the prices four times because I can’t believe them.

‘Why don’t they tell you
this
in postnatal? Never
mind breastfeeding.’

‘What about that place Fiona went to? How much was
that?’

‘Forget it.’

Fiona is my new friend at school. She always takes her family on
wonderful holidays, but then her husband works long hours so they save about
£4,000 by not going out during the year.

‘It was one of those resort things with a children’s
club.’

‘Which we can’t afford.’

‘And …’

‘What?’

‘Sophie was just under the age limit, so they only managed to get
rid of Tom.’

‘Nightmare. Still, we’ve always got the park.’

‘What, for six weeks? What shall we do? Oh, I forgot. You have a
job
. See you in September, then.’

September will be a Momentous Month. On the up side, Lydia is starting
nursery. On the other hand, Katarina is going home to Slovakia. She may not be
able to return.
Don’t panic.

‘DON’T GO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’

‘You’ll be fine. Can you let go of my leg?’

In the beginning it was Maureen who stood between me and madness, now
it’s Katarina. Sometimes, at around seven, I come downstairs and find the
children in bed and the table set with candles.

‘Even if you’re only having a takeaway,’ she says,
‘it will make you feel nice.’

She’s turning herself into an excellent cook, graduating from
slightly scary stews with Berlin Wall dumplings to aromatic stir-frys and
home-made chicken nuggets, which Lawrence and Lydia make with her in an eggy
assembly line. She’s a keen viewer of Graham Norton and
Eurotrash
,
and has ‘got’ English culture totally. The only thing she’s
missed is ‘Noo-noo’, her word for ‘front bottom’, being
the vacuum cleaner in
Teletubbies
, but then I missed that as well. She
has taught the kids ‘
hovno
’ and
‘
hovienko
’, Slovakian for ‘pooh’ and
‘little tiny pooh’. And picking up that they’re in danger of
copying my less than clean language, she gets them to practise
‘
Domcek!
’, a substitute expletive which is Slovakian for
‘house’.

‘It’ll do you both good to have a break,’ says Peter.
He’s right; we’re too similar. Intelligent and imaginative, but
proud and too easily hurt. When we start getting PMT at the same time, he
retreats upstairs with his car magazines. Witnessing her disappointments with
boyfriends is intolerably painful, like watching my younger self. That summer
her father dies suddenly, just as mine did, and we have that in common too.

On the day of her departure, we take her to Victoria Coach Station.
Lawrence cooperates, but Lydia won’t hold my hand amidst the huddled
masses, and when I tell her off, faints and does a wee on the concourse. At
least it undercuts the emotion of the occasion. When I find Peter, he is
standing, with husbandly foresight, next to the Pick ‘n’ Mix
stall.

‘Well done.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ The front of the coach says
Praha
. It
sounds somehow much further away than
Prague
. When she gets on, Peter
and I are both tearful. Lawrence and Lydia finally tear themselves away from
the Pick ‘n’ Mix and run after her calling, ‘I love
you!’ and: ‘You’re my best friend in the whole
world!’

The coach turns towards
Praha
, and we go home to practise being
Proper Parents.

Thank God for nursery school, then. Lydia’s been watching her
brother for a year, so knows the routine. At the door she does not cry or hang
onto my legs, but grabs an apron and heads straight for the dinosaur sandpit.
At the end of the day, I arrive to find her releasing the other children to
their mothers.

‘Oh, no!’ I say to the teacher.

‘I don’t mind!’ she says.

‘… And Luke, you can go,’ says Lydia.

So: the good news is, she’s more than ready for fulltime nursery;
the bad news is, she thinks she runs the place. But I don’t care, because
I now have five and a half hours of completely child-free time every day. I
shall name this Golden Time, when only Very Important Things shall be done. I
start by going to a cafe with a newspaper. It is so pleasurable that by the
time I get to the second coffee I feel quite degenerate. If only I’d
known it could take so little to have an
outrageously
good time,
I’d have had kids earlier. At fourteen.

Coming out of the school gate at around this time I notice Jay, a mother
I always smile at, though I don’t know her, because she wears fantastic
clothes and huge, sculptural earrings. She breezes through the other mummies
leaving a vapour trail of pizazz, a catwalk in a sea of Boden. She is also a
barrister who walks across Africa for mental health – other
people’s. She is talking to a small circle of mothers and nannies. Like a
tourist passing Speakers’ Corner, I slow down.

‘Someone asked me the other day how I do it,’ she’s
telling them. ‘And I said, “It’s simple: I put the children
to bed in their school uniforms, and give them chocolate for breakfast in the
car.” ’ There is a ripple of laughter and approval. And a bell goes
off in my head.

Other people take short cuts and ‘cheat’. What if MOST
of
them do? What if it’s – universal?

I go home and tell Peter: ‘We’re not the only ones.’
‘The only ones what?’

‘You know, who don’t heat bottles, and drink while
breastfeeding and – generally do it “wrong”.’

‘I’m sure we’re not.’

‘Yes, but what if everybody’s like that? But none of us
wants to own up? So we’re all – sort of hiding. Thinking everyone
else is doing it ‘properly’ – but no one is! Or almost no
one.’

‘What I can’t stand is those bloody celebrities going on
about how marvellous it all is, when they’ve got an army of cleaners and
nannies.’

‘Exactly! And the papers always telling us that if we put them in
childcare they’ll become shoplifters.’

‘But if you stay at home with them you’re “just a
mother”, so you can’t win.’

‘Yeah. I mean, have you ever met anyone who actually thinks
they’re doing a good job?’

‘Mrs Thatcher always seems to sound quite pleased with how
hers’ve turned out.’

‘There you go. For the rest of us, it’s taking short cuts,
and having a drink instead of reading them a bedtime story, and feeling guilty
all the time … Like when we ate their Easter eggs—’

‘You didn’t feel guilty.’

‘Yes, I did. Anyhow, it was your idea. Look, shut up. It’s
like abortion used to be. It just took one or two women to
“confess”. What if I could somehow say that? That it’s OK. We
could all “come out”.’